Of monsters and mud: Exploring the deep mysteries of Burns Bog (with video)

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METRO VANCOUVER — Burns Bog is one of the largest urban protected areas in the world — six times the size of Stanley Park — and perhaps the only one completely off limits to the public.

Access to Delta bog is so tightly regulated that only working scientists are allowed inside and only then if they agree in writing to remove their own feces to avoid adding nutrients to the ecosystem.

Yet here I am, on an empty stomach, treading on spongy hummocks and wooden planks surrounded by dark, acidic waters and deep, gooey pits so treacherous they nearly swallowed up a mountain biker trespassing here several years ago.

It took months of cajoling, but Metro Vancouver finally agreed to provide The Vancouver Sun exclusive access to Burns Bog on the 10th anniversary of its official protection in a $73-million land acquisition agreement involving all levels of governments.

“It’s a globally unique ecosystem,” confirms Richard Hebda, an adjunct professor of biology at the University of Victoria and member of the Burns Bog scientific advisory panel. “There’s no place like it.”

Large, raised peat bogs like Burns Bog are rare and occur where the water table is at or near the ground surface for most of the year, and drainage is slow due to relatively flat topography. Over time, a mound of peat slowly accumulates as the plants grow, decline and slowly decompose.

Sphagnum moss represents the foundation of the bog, with at least 12 species found here, each occupying its own niche, including those that float on water.

At almost 2,500 hectares, this place is officially the Burns Bog Ecological Conservancy Area: home to endangered species such as the Pacific water shrew, bonsai forests of shore pine, carnivorous sundews, shrubs heavy with both native and non-native berries, and species of plants such as the crowberry, cloudberry and bog rosemary normally found at more northerly latitudes.

On occasion, illegal marijuana growing operations are also found among the vegetation.

“One was busted a couple of years ago,” says Markus Merkens, natural resource management specialist with Metro Vancouver parks. “Police helped us remove the offending vegetation.”A 4 ½-hour tour with Merkens and Howie began at the 80th Street gate and continued along an access road reserved for emergency vehicles, where we sidestep dung from the bog’s largest predator, the coyote.

A few black bears used to live here, too, but are thought to have been shot out years ago due to lack of government protection. Trail cameras are set up in the bog to capture an image of a bruin, but they might as well be hunting sasquatch. “We got a beaver and a bunny rabbit,” Howie says of the footage.

In the bears’ absence, the bog is heavy with berries: introduced blackberries, native salal berries and both the native, low-growing native blueberry and the larger introduced blueberry found on surrounding farmland.

Black-tailed deer also live in the bog, but have been hammered as roadkill with opening of Highway 17, the South Fraser Perimeter Road, last December. Cranberry farmers in the area have also put up deer fences to help reduce losses.

The bog is home to 41 species of mammals, 11 amphibians, six reptiles and an estimated 4,000 invertebrates. Fish do poorly here due to water temperature, high acidity and low oxygen levels.

Despite the biodiversity, there is nothing as flashy as a huggable old-growth red cedar.

“Bog plants tend to be rather diminutive,” Howie confirms.

We even spot a grape vine, evidence of seeds deposited by a bird — one of 175 species recorded here.

“Do you hear that?” asks Merkens, pointing to a pair of sandhill cranes in the near distance. “There they are, behind those trees.” Although not always seen, the birds are identified by their distinctive rattling, bugle call. Burns Bog is a critical nesting site for the species in populous Metro Vancouver.

After the salmon spawning runs dry up, dozens of bald eagles also descend on the edge of the bog to feed on wintering waterfowl and, of course, the city landfill.

“It’s incredible,” Howie says. “They’re singing to each other and crashing through the bushes with huge wings.”

Up ahead are a clump of charred shore pines, evidence of a small fire that occurred here in 2007.

“It was May so the water table was high,” Howie says.

Two more serious fires claimed 170 hectares in 1996 and 200 hectares in 2005. Fires smoulder in the bog, are difficult to extinguish, and are devastating for a ecosystem that accumulates peat at just one millimetre per year.

The risk of fire is a main reason for keeping the public out of the bog, at least for several years while researchers get a better handle on the place and work to improve its ecological health after decades of industrial peat harvesting.Burns Bog is named after Dominic Burns, who purchased the site in 1906 for $26,000, according to an online history posted by Delta municipality.

During the Second World War, the U.S. government used peat from Burns Bog as a catalytic agent to refine magnesium for fire bombs. Peat plants were established on the east side in 1942 and west side in 1944. Peat later became popular in horticulture.

The bog was mined until 1984, creating unnatural ponds and producing about 110 kilometres of ditches that drained 40 per cent of the bog to improve peat extraction. Remnants of old wooden pipes used for moving water are still visible in the area. Only about 29 per cent of the bog remains undisturbed.

“It’s not pristine, it’s recovering,” Merkens explains.

Other impacts on the bog include the City of Vancouver landfill next door and the South Fraser Perimeter Road.

Beyond fire, the other reason for restricting access to Burns Bog is public safety.

To step off the trails is to risk getting lost. While open areas yield fleeting views of Mount Baker and the Cascade Mountains, the Lafarge rock-crushing plants in Richmond, the North Shore Mountains and Vancouver landfill, the more densely vegetated areas offer only the sun as a reference point.

And there’s the constant risk of being swallowed up like a second-rate actor in an old Tarzan movie. Take that 35-year-old trespassing mountain biker in October 2006: Dressed only in a T-shirt and shorts, he was stranded in the cold and wet for almost 90 minutes, waist deep in mud and water, found by a search-and-rescue helicopter in the dark after alerting emergency authorities just before his cellphone died.

Tsawwassen aboriginals have legends of an underground channel that flowed from the Strait of Georgia into the centre of Burns Bog, a place where monsters would drag people down into the peat.

Our journey follows a path through waist- to head-high brush.

“That smell is Labrador tea,” Howie says of an evergreen shrub historically used as a tonic. “It stays with you; you’ll smell it on your clothes.”

Along the way, we observe some of the man-made ditches that are beginning to fill in with sphagnum, which can hold up to 30 times its weight in water.

“This is exciting,” Merkens comments. "It’s amazing to see the sphagnum cover this.”

Bog managers are building small dams to better maintain water at levels more natural to a bog and prevent the flow of water to the outside. Beavers help the process, too, with their dams.

It’s tough for non-native plants to thrive in a true bog, but that’s not the case in drier, drained areas, where invaders such as European birch, evergreen blackberry, highbush blueberry, tawny cottongrass, brown-fruit rush and large cranberry can gain a roothold.

We spot a sign on the trail where the Invasive Species Council of B.C. has surgically applied the herbicide Roundup to kill the invasive Japanese knotweed.

A light wind keeps the mosquitoes at bay as we proceed across an open area. With each step, the surrounding ground quakes like jelly.In the middle of the opening sits a solar-powered “flux tower,” a research station tethered against wind storms by four cables and adorned with pink ribbons as a warning to birds. A helicopter transported it here in June to be monitored by the University of B.C.’s department of geography.

The tower bristles with meteorological instruments that measure “energy exchanges” at the surface, including measurement of rainfall, solar radiation and the evapotranspiration rates from both plants and standing water in the bog. Groundwater is also being tested for movement to ditches outside the bog.

“Bog ecology is so strongly related to the hydrology,” explains professor Dan Moore, a hydrology expert who also sits on the Burns Bog advisory committee. “We need to know the current state of hydrology to understand how we might restore the bog.”

A parallel study will shed light on how the recovering bog cycles carbon. Field measurements are being made to estimate methane and carbon dioxide releases from soils as well as absorption of carbon dioxide through photosynthesis in areas that are at different stages of recovery.

The depth of the water table is measured at more than 150 sites in and around the bog. Typically, the water table is at the surface during the rains of winter and 40 to 50 centimetres deep in summer. In unnaturally dry areas, it can be 80 centimetres to one metre deep. The water is very acidic, at 3.5 to 4 pH.

The bog gets its water from rainfall, and a 2000 study found it received 200 millimetres in excess of its annual requirements, which may help to handle the stress of coming climate change. In July, though, the bog can lose 80 to 90 millimetres more water than it receives.

Helping out on the research is Caroline Chestnutt, an undergraduate student with the University of Edinburgh who is more familiar with bogs in her native Northern Ireland where the peat is still harvested as a fuel source.

“This one is unique, really big and a raised bog,” she says.

In wetter areas of the bog, brackish ponds where the peat has been removed provide habitat for waterfowl, yellow pond lilies and both dragonflies and damselflies.

Elsewhere, the bog even has its own weather station protected by chain-link fencing. Environment Canada donated the station as surplus equipment after the 2010 Winter Olympics and posts information including the temperature and humidity hourly on its website.

The bog receives about one metre of rain per year, with as much as 200 millimetres more falling on the east side than the west.

Scientific research to date is, like the bog, proceeding at a slow pace. Metro Vancouver has a modest annual budget of $25,000 to $50,000, while Delta municipality, with responsibly for the hydrology, chips in another $50,000 to $60,000 per year.

Truth is, research on the bog will far outlive today’s crop of scientists. The official management plan spans 100 years — a time frame that reflects the challenge of repairing delicate, but damaged, ecosystems.

“I insisted that be written in,” Hebda said. “People need to understand that natural processes and nature respond over time. The bog is a practical demonstration of how this works.”

For more information on Burns Bog and a small, but legal, glimpse of a bog environment, visit the 60-hectare Delta Nature Reserve, located east of Highway 91, near the south end of Alex Fraser Bridge (burnsbog.ca).

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Of monsters and mud: Exploring the deep mysteries of Burns Bog (with video)

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